Muon g-2 experiment launches new website

The Muon g-2 experiment now has a new website, which launched this week.

On the new site, you can read about the motivation behind the proposed experiment, learn about the physics of the property known as the muon g-2 (pronounced gee minus two) and find out how the experiment will improve our understanding of the fundamental properties of space and matter.

The website also features a page on the experiment's centerpiece, a 50-foot-diameter, 700-ton muon storage ring. The Muon g-2 collaboration will relocate the superconducting-magnet ring, previously used in an experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory, 900 miles from Upton, NY, to Batavia, Ill., later this year.

Milestone

NOvA Far-Detector Building receives national award

The American Council of Engineering Companies has selected the NOvA Far-Detector Building in Ash River, Minn., for a National Recognition Award. Photo: Steve Dixon, FESS

The NOvA Far-Detector Building in Ash River, Minn., has earned a National Recognition Award in the American Council of Engineering Companies 2013 Engineering Excellence awards competition.

This award is a prestigious distinction, demonstrating exceptional achievement in engineering. Earlier this year, the NOvA building received recognition at the state level.

The NOvA building's award was based on its unique structural systems, providing a cost-effective method for spanning a clear distance of 63 feet while providing the equivalent of 10 feet of cosmic ray shielding.

"We give our wholehearted congratulations to the NOvA team, especially to the NOvA FESS team led by Steve Dixon," said Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim.

The American Council of Engineering Companies will present the award in a ceremony in Washington, D.C., in April.

Comet PanSTARRs over Fermilab: three perspectives

Reader Lorraine Mahoney submitted this photo of the comet over Fermilab taken from an even greater distance.

In the News

Analysis "strongly indicates" Higgs boson found: CERN

From Reuters, March 14, 2013

(Reuters) - Analysis of the tracks of an elementary particle found in the Large Hadron Collider last year "strongly indicates" that it is the long-sought Higgs boson, the CERN physics research center said on Thursday.

But a statement on the latest findings from huge volumes of data gathered during three years of collisions in the LHC stopped short of claiming the boson, believed to be the particle that gives matter to mass, had been discovered for sure.

Pi Day mashup

Twenty-five years ago, physicist Larry Shaw, of San Francisco's Exploratorium, established the first "Pi Day" on March 14th, or 3/14—a fitting date to commemorate an irrational number that so familiarly begins 3.14. The event started as a little staff get-together but ballooned into an international holiday (hear more in this SciFri segment). To get you in the celebratory mood, here are some tributes to those endless digits, and the Greek letter that symbolizes them.

For a brief history of pi and events surrounding the occasion, visit the Exploratorium's Pi Day site. (And by the way, March 14th also happens to be Albert Einstein's birthday.)

ZZ deals two pairs or four of a kind

Getting four of a kind is rare and exciting when playing poker and when examining events from DZero.

While being dealt four of a kind in poker is much more rare and memorable than getting two pairs, finding either is exciting in an event at DZero. The neutral Z boson, a weak force carrier, can decay into a pair of leptons, such as electrons or muons. This kind of decay is frequent enough that researchers use Z boson events to measure properties of the detector and calibrate it for use in other analyses. However, the simultaneous production of two Z bosons is very rare, only slightly more frequent than Higgs boson production. Sometimes both Z bosons will decay into electron or muon pairs, leading to very rare and striking events that could include four of the same kind of lepton.

The difficulty in finding these events lies in identifying all four leptons in the detector. Some leptons might fall outside the instrumented region of the detector while others may fail to meet the criteria used to select a lepton for the analysis. With four chances to miss a lepton, even small inefficiencies will add up. In a new analysis at DZero, analyzers make a focused effort to improve lepton selection and boost the efficiency for finding events with two Z bosons.

The new analysis finds a total of 13 candidate events in the full Tevatron Run II data set, collected over the course of a decade. This handful of observed events is consistent with the Standard Model expectation for simultaneous Z boson pair production. Since the Higgs boson can also decay into pairs of Z bosons, the analyzers also extended their analysis to search for hints of the Higgs boson. No significant excess of events was observed in the search, as expected considering the sensitivity of this analysis to Higgs boson production. Measurements of rare processes are important probes of the Standard Model, which passes this test with all aces.

—Mike Cooke

These analyzers made significant contributions to this analysis.

The DZero algorithms and computing coordinators organize the collaboration's efforts to develop and maintain the core software packages and computing infrastructure used to perform physics analyses.

Feature

Science documentary "The Believers" screens tomorrow

If you saw "Fermilab: Science at Work" when it premiered at the laboratory last month or the award-winning "The Atom Smashers," then you're familiar with the thought-provoking work of 137 Films. Tomorrow, March 15, at 8 p.m. in Ramsey Auditorium, the Fermilab Lecture Series will bring you another 137 Films documentary, "The Believers."

"The Believers" begins in 1989, when two respected scientists announced a startling claim: They can solve all the world's energy problems using seawater, batteries and a mysterious glass contraption in a process they called cold fusion. Within days, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann were media stars. But only three months later, their careers in tatters and their reputations ruined, they fled the country and "cold fusion" became synonymous with "bad science." An embarrassed press, a confused public who witnessed this highly unusual science fight and the entire mainstream science community—knowing cold fusion violates the laws of physics—all assumed the concept was dead. This film tells the story of a group of professional and amateur scientists, a high-school whiz kid, and an Internet deejay who more than 20 years later believe that Pons and Fleischmann were right after all. The ailing Fleischmann himself is also featured, filmed not long before his death in 2012.

Following tomorrow's screening, there will be a 30-minute panel Q&A session with the film's directors, Clayton Brown and Monica Long Ross, and two physicists, Eric Prebys of Fermilab's Accelerator Physics Center and Heidi Schellmann, professor of high-energy physics at Northwestern University.